


The Prompt Bag of Mysteries

by spider_fingers



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Jess!Delilah, Marked!Jessamine, Modern AU, Multi, archive warnings replaced by individual chapter warnings, prince!Daud
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-17
Updated: 2019-01-26
Packaged: 2019-07-13 14:38:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 18,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16019993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spider_fingers/pseuds/spider_fingers
Summary: small ficlets for prompts; for now includes self-imposed prompts and Bad Things Happen Bingo. pairings and subject visible in the chapter titles. warnings available at the beginning of every chapter.





	1. "I fell in love with my best friend." -- CorvoJess, past CorvoDaud

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> CorvoJess is present, but the emotional focus is on CorvoDaud :P i am weak and have no regrets
> 
> warnings: mild nsfw

He says it while Jess is still basking in the afterglow, sweaty, luxuriously stretching out on her wide and comfortable mattress, half-smothered by heaps of blankets. He's been staring up at the ceiling while she sighed contentedly. His arms follow the angles of his sides, his hands folded on his naked stomach. It seemed strange at first, but Jess let it be, assuming he was still getting over the shock of bedding a princess.

Then he says it.

“I fell in love with my best friend,” he says, casual and calm, like this is something he might reveal at any moment: the dinner table, with her father present for the evening meal; the social gatherings out in the courtyard with the Ladies Boyle and Adelle White; the minutes after a very energetic romp between the sheets with her, the daughter of the Emperor, Jessamine Kaldwin, heir to the throne. What does it even mean? For a long time she thought she was his best friend, until she learned to recognize the yearning as something more than respect and admiration.

She very much hopes he's not admitting to some sort of deepest feeling. She's eighteen. She doesn't want a devoted boyfriend.

(Well, maybe, if it doesn't make him even more prone to hovering. The sex  _ was _ very good.)

“What?” she says, turning up on her elbow and praying to all the spirits in the Void he'll drop the subject.

“In 1812,” he says, and Jess curses the Outsider instead. Just as useless as the Abbey claims. “In Karnaca. We were past midsummer but the days were still disgustingly hot, and we went skinny dipping in the sea at the foot of Batista. We'd go on the rocks and dry in the sun after.”

He sounds very far away, like he doesn't really know what he's saying. Jess curls a little closer and watches him, watches his calm face. His dark eyes. They look so lovely now.

“He told me I had better stay close to home the next few days, because the gangs were gearing up for a hell of a fight and he could feel it like a storm waiting to burst. So I thought, I won't get to see him for a while. And then I rolled over and I kissed him.”

Oh. She hadn't really considered it – that he might have kissed his friend. He had been fourteen in 1812. She tries to imagine him at that age, awkwardly kissing a faceless boy, tender and artless, but she doesn't manage to erase the half-grown beard he's been cultivating for a year now. It makes for a very strange-looking fourteen-year-old. He refused to shave it off despite her loudly commenting on how it made his mouth look like a rat's ass (but not in polite society, she wasn't that cruel). Jess considers pouting, but he's still talking, still lost in whatever bright-lit world has caught him.

“It was a fun few months,” he says. “He disappeared in the middle of the year. I never saw him again.”

“Oh.” Now she feels a little guilty for being distracted. “That's– You don't know where he went?”

“No,” he says, and though she has never seen him cry his voice is heavy and thick like right now he might want to. Like it's hitting him, so many years after the fact, that the friend he knew is lost to time and geography. She's only somewhat resentful he needed to have this revelation right after having sex with her.

“Do you remember his name?” she asks. Maybe if she gets him on another track, he'll stop moping and smile a little. He looks so much better when he smiles. “Maybe we could –”

“It doesn't matter,” he cuts in, and Jess swallows back her annoyance at being interrupted. Her father has told her she's too quick to dismiss people's concerns when they act out of emotion. It's something she's working on. “The teachers at our school used to say his mother was a witch. I think the Overseers got him. He's good as dead.”

The afterglow is good and ruined now. Jess purses her lips, considering – then scooches closer and wraps an arm around his waist, tucking herself into his side. If he must be a killjoy then by the Void he will tolerate her using him as a comforting pillow.

A few minutes later his hand comes up into her hair and strokes through it soothing and slow, until the warmth of the sun through the window pulls her down into sleep.


	2. "Do you think they could have loved me?" -- Corvo & Emily

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> warnings: High Chaos, violence mostly non-graphic

The tails of fire devouring Draper's Ward can be seen even from Dunwall Tower, as long as you are looking from the ramparts of the crenellated roof. Emily stands there, leaning forward with her hands on the low wall as support; the wind whips her hair into her face. She watches that distant part of her city burn. Corvo, lurking in the shadow of Burrows' monstrous metal war room, watches her.

“How many were there?” she asks. She isn't crying. She hasn't cried since Corvo pared Havelock's head from his neck and the guttering arterial spray soaked through her lacey shift. Her eyes are wide and black and shining in the far-off hungry light.

Corvo doesn't move forward, but his voice carries to her anyway, thin and rasping as it is. “Not many. Three or four hundred.” Some say it was ruined in all the fires he set. Too much smoke breathed in, too much heat scorching his throat. Rudshore was the first reduced to ash and cinder – but when it burned all that went with it was corpses. Kingsparrow went up in a flurry of flame and howling. Emily still remembers the guards beating at the gates. “They were easy to herd behind the barriers.”

She is twelve, and the plague has been murdered in its sickbed. The dissidents remain.

Sound does not travel this far across the city. She imagines there could be a gunfight in the Tower district streets and none of it would reach them this far up. Still, she thinks she can hear the screaming of the flames.

“Do you think they could have loved me?”

The words step out of her mouth unprompted. Her face is dry; the wind rushes cold and all she can feel is the burn of the fire.

“No,” Corvo says. His gaze is steady. So are his hands. “That's why they had to die. They can't be forgiven. They can't make up for their mistakes.”

The mistake of speaking up against her, of gathering to protest the ever stricter curfews and directives, the laws put in place to protect them. There will be more. There are always more. They grow like tumours in the stinking body of her city. Excision: the cutting away of something diseased. Sokolov said the word like it left a bad taste in his mouth. When Corvo took it for himself, it came out as unshakeable fact.

“They had to die,” Emily says, and she watches until the flames and the screaming go quiet.


	3. "I could kill you right now!" -- Esma/Lizzy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> warnings: mild nsfw, injuries

Esma is pretty as anything when she's angry. Her face gets all flushed, red up to her knife-sharp cheekbones, and she keeps pulling her hands through her hair, getting it all ruffled and disordered,  _ mm, _ the just-fucked kind of messy. Lizzy's mouth hangs a little open as she stares, and her tongue touches her upper lip, absent-minded, unbothered by the scrape of her sharpened teeth. Esma blushes a deeper red. Then she scowls and tightens her morning coat around herself. It's late into the night, but she only has a filmy nightgown on, and the wind up on the balcony is bitingly cold.

“What are you doing here?” she demands. Lizzy watches the movement of her unadorned face, rouge and creams and social mask wiped away; there is a hint of darkness under her eyes, like she hasn't been sleeping well. Lizzy preens at the thought it might be for her weeks of absence. “You could at least have knocked downstairs, like someone civilized.”

“I can still come knockin' if that's what you want,” Lizzy says, lecherous, leaning back on the balcony railing with legs braced wide. Esma snorts, haughtily dismissive, but doesn't quite manage to hide the smile tugging at the corner of her lips. Lizzy sucks at her teeth. The night sways around her, and the lights aren't as steady as she remembers. It's disorienting. “Anyway, y'r door boy 'd have a fit.”

“Unsurprising, given the state of your teeth.” Esma comes closer, her arms still tucked in close to stay warm, and stops in the vee of Lizzy's legs. “Whatever drove you to–”

Lizzy gently holds her chin between thumb and pointer and kisses her, soft, a press of chapped lips.

It's a new thing, the teeth. At first Lizzy had expected to be surprised by her own feral mouth at every turn – biting her cheek, biting her lip, rubbing the inside of her own mouth raw with the jagged ends – but it had been like she'd found a missing piece of herself, like this was what they had always been, and she had only cut away the unnecessary parts. She likes them. She feels more real with them like this.

“I can bite a man's finger off now,” she says, half-slurred, breathing against Esma's mouth.

Esma is frowning again. “How did you even get up here, drunk as you are?”

“I'm not,” she growls, “drunk,” and when she moves to resettle against the railing the burn in her side locks her lungs shut. She hasn't often felt pain this bad. It's kind of impressive.

Esma's hand is on her upper arm, tight around the jacket sleeve, pulling at her. “What is– Are you  _ hurt? _ If you bled on anything I'm levying a tax on your next trip up the Wrenhaven.”

“I just got shot, 's not a big deal,” Lizzy says.

“I could  _ kill you  _ right now!” Esma hisses, and the way she glares at her makes Lizzy want a lot of things, most of which are going to be difficult if she doesn't find a way to lessen the pain or stop the bleeding. “How did you get up here?”

“Climbed,” she says, and the next wave of dizziness almost floors her. Esma dives in to keep that from happening, her coat flapping carelessly open. Lizzy wishes, eyes muzzily wandering from a drawn face to the swell of flesh under cotton right beneath her cheek, that her gown were a little more gauzy.

“Outsider's purulent cock, Lizzy, this isn't a tupenny rag,” Esma spits, livid and awkwardly dragging her inside and so terribly, awfully terrified, and Lizzy laughs, uproarious, and spends the next few minutes trying not to puke all over Esma's soft bed linens from how badly the hole in her side jangles.

The night is long. Lizzy snarls at the suggestion of doctors; demands liquor, a needle, catgut – Esma tempests and complies, though she has nothing but silk thread. The answering wheeze almost sets her off, until Lizzy smiles, wide and toothy and eye-crinkling soft, and says, “Yeah, that'll do. Shoulda known.”

At the end Esma contemplates her ruined, bloodied towels and says, hands clasped and shaking and a bland pouting frown on her face, “Next time, find yourself a proper surgeon.”

Lizzy grabs her elbow, grinning. “Got the makin's of one right here, don't I?” Then, the smile tighter, her eyes gone narrow with seriousness, like the face she might give a real threat: “There won't be a next time.”

And there isn't. Always, she comes back; always, there are more scars. Her blood never stains the Boyle sheets again.


	4. "That's irrational." -- Piero & Sokolov

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> warnings: dubious morality in science

The sketch of the heart lies between them on the table – or the Heart, rather. It's something he feels on an uncomfortably physical level. Whatever he had meant it to be, it has become much more.

“Yes...” Anton is saying, poring over the schematics like a general over strategic maps, intense in his focus. “Reviving a weakened heart... Prolonging life...” He's been muttering to himself about potential applications for the last five minutes of scrutiny, lost in his own world of conjecture.

Piero flinches a little, unnoticed. He's never been all that attracted by the practical aspects of invention and creation. Little of his work has been as pragmatic as his solution for the plague, and that in part for its publicity, the draw of a rivalry with the head of the Academy.

To be honest, he built the Heart to see if he could.

(A heart! Cut from the chest of something dead! Beating, once more!

And the dreams. The haze, the pulsing fever. They drove him to strange things, especially during the hectic times of the plague. He wonders, sometimes, whether he'd had a touch of the sickness, and no one had noticed only because he didn't bleed from the eyes. He tries to forget the circumstances of those months, if not his achievements during them.)

“You say you lost the proof of concept?” Anton says, and Piero draws himself up, voice unsteady as ever though this time he feels the nervousness like a vibration between his ribs.

“It was stolen from my workshop,” he tries to explain, “by some vagrant I imagine, the preserving fluids would have made it unpalatable to rats –”

“And this lens, here,” Anton interrupts, tapping the sketch. “What is its purpose?” The concept was much more fanciful than the final product, Piero will freely admit, the glass pane set in a neatly bolted metal circlet on the drawing turned to a plain stretch of glass and cobbled wire. To be frank, he hardly remembers why he included it at all. It had only seemed an important part of the whole. Incomplete, without that little window.

“To see the soul inside,” his mouth says without his input, and his tongue feels strangely numb, his teeth aching and fuzzy, like they sometimes are when he wakes after a night of grinding them together. Anton looks up at him with his lip curled.

“That's irrational,” he sneers. “The soul does not live in the heart! And even if that preposterous assumption were true, it would not be visible to the naked eye, for one, and would have long left the body behind with death. I dare say you didn't operate on anyone living to achieve this result.”

“Of course you'd assert things you know nothing about,” Piero mutters, and throws his hands in the air, the gesture much louder than his words. “The soul has never been measured, its house is only speculated on, but if the eminent head of our Academy says it must be so –”

The argument is long and bitter, as all their discussions often end up being – but at least it distracts him from the memories.

The body had been dead when he found it, of course. Experiments concerning the production of oil by a human body notwithstanding, performing such an operation on a live patient would be needlessly cruel. (Though – what Anton had said, about the soul leaving the body behind in death – perhaps with a living body –)

It was before the Hound Pits – too well-watched there to do anything but mechanical tinkering – but far enough into the spread of the plague that bodies were hard to come by, burned as soon as they were found in an attempt to control the disease. Piero had come home to his apartment and found his neighbor's door ajar.

They had hung themselves. Outside, the loudspeakers blared about precautions to take, and necessary wariness towards strangers and possible carriers. The body was fresh, and in good condition, and Piero had been thinking about that beating heart for a month.

He took it. People came searching, of course, but he knew how to cover his tracks. The result of his efforts had been sharp and beautiful. It still shows up in his dreams: dark, and beating, and fearful.

He tries to forget about it now.


	5. "It must be hard with your sense of direction [...]" -- CorvoDaud

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> full prompt: "It must be hard with your sense of direction, never being able to find your way to a decent pickup line."
> 
> warnings: very mild nsfw, embarrassingly terrible flirting

“Are those... space pants...” Daud grates, and everything in him is desperate to stop the words coming out of his mouth – except for the very small, and very stubborn part hell-bent on seeing this through to its inevitable stupid conclusion, “because your... ass... is out of this world...”

The stranger who just sat down at the bar considers him with a mixture of amusement and disbelief. Neither of these are satisfying. Daud thinks he preferred the nervous fear of the last couple of attempts, though he still doesn't know where it stemmed from.

“It must be hard with your sense of direction, never being able to find your way to a decent pickup line,” the man quips back.

Daud squints, frowning, and sips his whiskey with a bitterly pursed mouth. “I might be rusty on the flirting,” he bites, “but my sense of direction is in peak condition.”

“No doubt,” the stranger says, goadingly placating.

“And,” Daud adds, eyes even narrower with suspicion, “you prepared that line.”

“While you came up with yours all on your own?” he retorts, wry, and thanks the barkeep with a nod for the finger of liquor now in his hand. He turns back to Daud with a twisty little smile. “A friend of mine sat here some time ago, suffered through your routine. I thought I'd see it in action.”

“Which one?”

“Tall girl, brown hair. Straight-laced.”

“Mm.” Daud finishes his whiskey. He's not sure how many this makes. “I remember her. Pissed her off.” He waits until the barkeep comes back around and asks for another. Going by the look the woman shoots him, the number of glasses must be getting up there – but she gets him another, and he quietly savors it, the stranger in the seat next to his not moving away. Observing him, even. Daud turns to him, scowling and hunched.

“You don't even seem to be enjoying it,” the man says, gaze frank and curious, like Daud had asked him what he was looking at. (The question had definitely crossed Daud's mind, in any case.) “I watched you a while. You look like you want to murder someone instead of taking them home.” He, however, seems unafraid, leaning an elbow loose and casual against the bar, his face open. Maybe it's because he's stacked. His waist is lean, but he's not wearing any sleeves and his arms are thick with muscle. The breadth of his shoulders only avoids being intimidating because Daud himself is built like a brick shithouse, and knows how to use that strength.

Daud looks back up from his contemplation of the stranger's bare biceps to find the man's gaze strangely unreadable. He shrugs.

“My... coworker told me to try it. Flirting.” And Rinaldo would suffer extensively for it. Daud can feel his face trying to look simultaneously disgusted and betrayed. “He said it was supposed to be _fun._ ”

“It is if you know what you're doing,” the stranger assures him, and the half-smile is back, though changed. “Pickup lines, though – those aren't so much flirting as, uh...”

“Shooting someone in the face,” Daud offers.

The stranger looks nonplussed. Possibly alarmed.

“With your... awkwardness,” Daud corrects, and the man's face twitches, and his smile opens, a crooked grin showing off the pointed tip of a canine as he snorts.

“That works,” he says.

“Sorry for shooting you in the face,” Daud answers, nose wrinkling as he grimaces. He regrets every single stupid line Rinaldo suggested he say.

Maybe he could get away with breaking a couple of Rinaldo's fingers. Nothing permament. It'd be a just comeuppance, considering the evening.

The stranger looks at him, cool and still smiling some and – soft, Daud supposes. It's a soft kind of look. “You're a bit drunk, aren't you,” the man says, and Daud huffs into his almost-empty umpteenth glass.

“I'm a bit drunk,” he agrees, and downs the rest in one go, throat working, breath hitching with the burn. He turns back to the other man to see him asking the barkeep for water. “Turning in early, stranger?”

“One of them is for you,” the man says as the barkeep sets two tall glasses down on the bar.

Daud tilts his head. “I'll partake.”

The stranger hands one over to Daud. Their fingers brush – but somehow, it isn't until the man pulls back and looks Daud right in the eye with that half-smile and says, “I'm Corvo Attano,” that Daud realizes.

His pointing finger is nearly accusing. “You're flirting with me.”

“Guilty as charged,” Attano says, unrepentant.

Daud frowns. The glass of water perspires in his hand, stingingly cold in contrast to the muggy warmth of the barroom. “Why?”

Attano's eyes narrow, but in a way that looks fox-like and pleased rather than annoyed. “Fishing for compliments?”

“What compliments?” Daud scowls harder. He's starting to feel the unknown number of glasses affecting him. He feels strangely heavy, his every movement too weighted, off-balance. He doesn't usually overindulge. “I've been acting the oaf for the past thirty minutes.”

Attano is silent for a moment, watching Daud sip at the water. “You're handsome, for one,” he says, still quiet compared to the hustling din around them, and yet somehow his every word stands out like they're sitting in an empty room. “And your voice is to die for.”

Daud looks at his glass. Condensation builds a film on the upper half; drops gather and run down its side, pool on the bartop. Then he looks at Corvo, and his hand is curling in Corvo's collar, gentle, and he's pulling Corvo in. He stops before their mouths touch, a fragile inch still between them, eyes darting over Corvo's face.

His breath blows hot and liquor-sharp over Daud's face. His eyes are dark. In the center of their black iris, the pit of his pupil is hungry and wide.

His hand is warm and dry where it folds around the back of Daud's neck and pulls him closer still.

When they part Corvo's breathing is heavy and Daud's lips feel tender; his tongue flicks out to wet them, and Corvo follows the movement with an avid look on his face.

“I'm more adept at the physical side of things,” Daud mutters. They're still very close. Corvo's eyes flick up to his, something amused in the way they wrinkle at the corners.

“Was that a come-on?” he asks, low and rumbling, and Daud flushes hot.

“It could be,” he says. “If you wanted.”

“How about you buy me dinner first,” Corvo says, smirking, and Daud downs the rest of his water to try and cool the sudden burning in his gut.

 


	6. "What do you mean? It's exciting!" -- Emily & Alexi

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> warnings: High Chaos, kids being fucked up

“Your proud navy present your Majesty these pirates, captured today during a great battle on the sea!” Alexi proclaims, grinning and straight-backed in her cobbled-together naval commodor's uniform. She brandishes her stick at the doll in the middle, the one with a tricorn hat. “There,” she exclaims, “is their leader, the dreadful Captain Morgen, wanted on three counts of pillaging coastal towns, five of thievery, one of insulting your Majesty, and – and being a terrible fiend, and, uh –”

“And many more counts of rape and murder,” Emily adds, hands folded regally in the small of her back. Alexi wrinkles her nose.

“Right, that.”

The dolls are lined up against the wall like prisoners for a firing squad. Emily regards them with an air of gleeful anticipation.

“So what now?” Alexi asks, still catching her breath after her speech, still grinning.

Emily draws up onto tiptoe, hands making delighted fists. “Now we chop all of their heads off!”

It's exactly what she's been imagining: an unchecked thrill at having the Captain helpless and in reach. Of course she's always loved the character, a staple villain of her favorite novel since she was seven – loves his schemes and his daring and his power – but she loves this more. If she kills Captain Morgen, that means _she's_ the strongest in the Empire of the Isles.

But then Alexi says, “Oh,” and “But –” and Emily stops in her advance, poker drawn up to start smashing, to look back at her.

“What?”

“But what about the trials?” Alexi blurts out, confused rather than embarrassed at having interrupted the game.

Emily frowns and props her hands on her hips. “I ordered an execution. We don't need a trial.”

“But – well, the Captain, yes, but the crew –”

“They work for him!”

“Not since always,” Alexi stubbornly maintains. “It wouldn't be right.”

“I'm Empress,” Emily says, and her hand tightens around the poker. It's starting to feel heavy in her hand. “I decide what's right.”

Emily sees the moment Alexi remembers herself – the way she straightens, not because she's playing the role of the commodor, but because she's in the presence of the Empress of the Isles. Her arms are much stiffer at her sides.

“Of course. I just– Your dolls are so pretty. I don't want to break them.”

“Well they're mine, and I do,” Emily says, final, and turns back to the dolls with their backs to the wall.

“Emily, please,” Alexi says, and her voice is much higher than Emily is used to hearing, a shade unsteady. “I don't like this.”

Emily throws up her hands, exasperated. “What do you mean? It's exciting!”

Alexi looks paler than usual. The stick is lax in her grip; the tip touches the ground. “I don't want to play this anymore.” She isn't stooped, or folded in on herself, but somehow she looks smaller – or maybe she's further away. “I don't want you to hurt them.”

“They're just dolls,” Emily says, but even as she's saying it she knows that's not what Alexi is talking about. She looks down, at the tips of her shoes. She's Empress. She decides. But she doesn't like that look in Alexi's eyes – it's too much like what she's seen in the faces of people who know they've done something she won't forgive.

Alexi leaves, and in the night Emily dreams of her – but there is someone else behind her face. Something else behind her black, black eyes.

_Is it because you're afraid?_ Alexi asks, and her mouth moves, unsynchronized.

“It's because _they_ should be afraid of _me!_ ” Emily wants to shout, but however hard she tries the empty blue air sucks all the strength from her voice. If they were afraid, they'd never come near her. They'd know never to try.

_The more of them you kill,_ says the thing with Alexi's face, all echoes, _the more the rest will hate and revile you._

“I don't care!” Emily screams, and it is reduced to a keening hiccup of a cry. “I don't care! Corvo'll kill them, too!”

_Down to the last one?_

“ _Yes,_ ” Emily hisses, vicious and vindictive, and Alexi's face is carefully blank, washed out, like an old porcelain doll's.

_Then there will be nothing left but the rats._

Emily wakes sobbing, her face already wet, her throat raw like she's been yelling here instead of in the chasm of her dreaming, and Corvo barges through the door with his sword unsheathed. He's at her side in a moment, hovering, his free arm curved and hovering above her like he means to snatch her up and carry her to safety but she's saying, “No, no, stop,” and shoving at his chest, pushing him back, the whispering knobs of his bonecharms bruising-hard under her palms.

He says nothing. He only looks down at her, and his eyes are almost as dark as the thing in her dreams.

“No,” she says again, “leave me alone,” and he leaves. She watches the silver line of his sword where it flashes at his side. It's clean; she remembers it filthy. She can't remember it any other way.

She sits in her too-large bed, and does not sleep until morning.


	7. carved mark -- DelilahRags

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> warnings: mutual manipulation, and a general warning for both of the main ladies, who deserve it

It stings, still, though the blood has dried in thick clotted lines on the back of her hand. The old woman is rooting through the shelves of the dilapidated house. She is all bones under the thick, expensive fabric of her clothes. Her fingertips had been bruisingly hard against the skin of Delilah's wrist while the other hand worked its painful magic.

Delilah does not feel different, beyond the calming flutter of her heartbeat now that her hand no longer burns and runs red. Shouldn't she feel different? Stronger? Better than the helpless little girl she had been a month ago, when the watchman turned her away from her mother's prison? She clenches her fists. The left twinges, the forming scabs cracking, seeping reddish down the back of her fingers. Her palm is tacky with it.

“Now, dearie,” says the old woman, her voice all soft and sour and right by Delilah's ear, “that just won't do.” She startles, flinching away, but the old woman's fingers bite down on her knuckles, surprising in their strength, keeping her from moving. The edge of a cracked nail traces the ridges. It's a strangely comforting thing. “It will come. In time.” The old woman's eyes are pale and gray, like bad milk. She sees nothing, Delilah knows, but – sometimes it feels as though they do see, in the black blindness, somewhere far beyond the walls. Maybe it's the Void they gaze into.

 

Her mother had warned her what happened to a girl's body when she gets of a certain age. She changed – she grew – she became skin and bone, too. The face she saw in Rags' tarnished silver mirror was sallow and sharp and hardly her own.

(Other people – children, mothers, grown men – called her Granny. Every time, Delilah sneered to herself. The old woman was a ruin, yes, but nothing so familiar as they made her out to be. Not aged like they expected, not cracked like they thought – not a house, empty and hollowed over time. Something else. Something with depthless eyes.)

Delilah grew and the scabs on the back of her hand hardened into scars.

 

“Exquisite,” says Rags the first time Delilah gets the brew exactly right. The surface shimmers and dances. The bubbles that surface set the colors to writhing, like the cauldron is full of rats, a mass being boiled alive. Rags dips a finger in, sucks on it like a hapenny sweet. Even at a distance of two feet, the vapor coming off the poison needles the skin of Delilah's arms.

Rags is changing, too. She no longer stoops. Her back is straight as the rod the head cook at Dunwall Tower sometimes struck Delilah's shins with when she wasn't quick enough. The thick silver-white hair she keeps tightly knotted seems sleeker, less unkempt. Her teeth are off-puttingly white in her mouth when she smiles.

“That's my good girl,” she says, and Delilah feels her lungs constrict, feels the hair on her nape stand on end. Feels a little warm. ( _You cook, do you?_ Rags had said, months ago now. _We'll see what we can make of you. A soup? A stew? No, no, far too bitter. Little almond girl._ Delilah had been vicious, and terrified, and nothing she could do would make the old woman let go.)

 

Delilah watches Rags. Her scarred hand tingles as she stirs the cauldron.

The shoulders of Rags' vest had always been squared and padded, strengthening the line of her back, but now Rags seems to wear it, to move in it, like it might be a part of herself. Confident. Regal. Her gestures are certain and decisive.

Delilah's stomach twists with something like envy. Rags' hands are no longer so thin. They are still fine, still cold, but the skin no longer looks as if it hangs from bone and sinew. The deepset lines in her face seem to be melting away. When Rags settles a hand in the small of Delilah's back as though telling her to straighten, the impression – light, deliberate, _unyielding_ – remains.

Later, they eat. Rags has taken to setting up a proper table in the evenings. They sit at opposite ends.

Delilah contemplates her meal, then the unknowable shrewdness of Rag's perpetual ghost of a smile – and shoves the plate aside, climbs onto the table, stalks across crockpot, candlestick, and cutlery and sits on the edge of the table with her legs hanging down and takes Rags by her perfect, grimy lapels and kisses her, firm, awkward, immediately embarrassed. She tries to pull back.

Rags' grip on her jaw keeps her there.

“Now,” she murmurs, “that just won't do.”

Her lips are cold and hard, too. In the night, Delilah touches her own mouth, hot with bruising, tenderized.

 

The knobs of Delilah's wrists stand out stark. So do the tendons of her neck. The jut of her narrow hips. Her cheekbones throw dark shadows down each side of her face. She is so tall, and so meager. She looks like she's aged ten years. Or twenty. Yet she feels no weaker. The scars have darkened, though they aren't the Void-black of the tracing she's glimpsed on Vera's left hand.

The color is coming back into Vera's hair. Well, for a given sense of color – the streaks are black, pitch and gleaming, lustrous. Her throat is pale but her cheeks are pink. Though her eyes are still as faded, the number of books with uncanny illustrations and illegible print on the shelves grows by the week.

Delilah stirs her cauldron diligently. The concoction looks marbled, slick and opaque. It isn't ready.

She slips a finger along the inner rim and touches it to the tip of her tongue. The burn is sharp and immediate. It's all wrong. It should be smooth, and sweet. It should go down easy.

She'll get it right. In time.

 

There isn't a ripple, not a bubble, but Delilah knows that if a rat fell in it would die on the spot.

The liquid shines like a mirror. She looks into it, and she can see her face – but despite there being no distortion, there is something subtly off. The lines, not exactly the same. Or like someone else sits behind her eyes.

Vera, she knows, is laying the table, careful to set the knives and forks and spoons carved from bone exactly right beside the plates. The stew is thick and hearty.

Delilah smiles. This will do just fine.


	8. locked up and left behind -- CorvoDaud

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> warnings: mild nsfw
> 
> (and!!!! this prompt has fanart!!!!!!!! which you can see [here](https://aimlessfool.tumblr.com/post/180526235573/the-apartment-is-old-at-the-edge-of-the), drawn by [aimlessfool](https://aimlessfool.tumblr.com/) on tumblr! _thank you so much oh my god_ )

“I got through the Flooded District fine before.”

“You had the Mark then,” Daud points out, and though he's trying not to let the anger boil up, Corvo's deliberately casual crossing of arms makes it clear he doesn't want to hear any of it.

“I know the area –”

“Not as well as I do,” Daud cuts in. “This sector's still in ruins. Everything from rooftops to walls to floor is liable to fall apart. It's been _fifteen years._ ” Corvo's expression is closing off like he's halfway to being convinced but still refuses. It's in these moments Daud resents Corvo's tendency to dig his heels in the most. “If things go sideways –”

“Thomas' team is making sure that won't happen,” Corvo retorts.

“Doesn't remove all risks.”

“Neither does having the Mark,” he bites out, and Daud's mouth pinches shut. He turns away, jaw locked, shoulders tense under the red coat.

Something in Corvo relents, and he reaches out, takes Daud by the elbow, his grip light as a question. Daud stiffens then turns into him, furrowed brow turning his face dour. Corvo cups his jaw, thumb and pointer curved around his ear.

“I followed you here without issue,” he says, soft. “I'll be fine. And you can't stop me.”

Daud grasps the arm holding him in place. “Fine,” he says, and then he mutters, “This is a bad idea,” so low he might be talking to himself, but his other hand is clamping around the back of Corvo's head and pulling him in even as Daud pushes him back the two steps to the wall.

The apartment is old, at the edge of the unrestored sector of the Flooded District, but it must have belonged to someone rich: the wallpaper still looks fancy despite the rot and the hanging strips, and there's a radiator digging into the small of Corvo's back. He minds a lot less than he might. Daud's mouth on his and the hot press of his body are welcome distractions.

Daud's grip falls from his elbow to his wrist, the hand in Corvo's hair tilting his head, and Corvo lets out a muffled sound that cuts off when he hears a click –

The pressure is overwhelmingly familiar. Corvo's heart drops to his boots. They might be padded, but he'd recognize the feeling of cuffs around his wrists anywhere.

Daud steps back. His arm is wrenched out of Corvo's grip by the restraining line of the handcuffs locking him to the radiator. His other hand slides away from Corvo's face and hangs, listless, at his side.

“What are you –”

“You will stay here, Corvo,” Daud says, voice firm, “and when we're done –”

“Don't you _dare_ –”

“– and when we're done I will come back, and we'll head for the Tower together.”

Corvo snarls and hauls two-handed at the chain, but it doesn't budge. It's a good make. He had to make sure of that himself when he commissioned them.

“Turnabout is fair play,” Daud says.

“Do you always carry these around on you?” he asks through bared teeth, caustically bitter.

“They're a potent reminder,” Daud says, and the smirk is tired but there as he watches Corvo struggle a short moment then stop, knowing it won't work.

“Oh really?” Corvo says, one eyebrow cocking despite the furious snap to the words. He can't help playing into this back-and-forth. “What of?”

“That sometimes what you want,” Daud answers, turning for the window, “isn't what's best for you.”

Corvo yanks again in a surge of anger, the radiator ringing, but doesn't know whether Daud hears it before disappearing in a flutter of shadows.

 

He spends half an hour inspecting the radiator before giving it up as a lost cause. Daud had managed to get the other cuff around a thick metal part, closed in on both sides, and Corvo had never really learned how to pick a lock. He sits on the dusty floor and waits. His fingers keep coming back to the padded inside of the cuff, constantly rechecking whether it might be loose enough to slip out. It's solid and snug around his wrist.

Corvo had these made specially. Sometimes, with certain assassins whose hypermobile thumbs allowed them escape from most restraints, you had to take extra precautions.

 

_Daud woke with a twitch at the break of dawn. Corvo, already conscious for an hour by then, watched the tired lines deepen in his face, his eyes scrunching tightly shut before opening in a series of slow blinks, his lax mouth sinking back into its downturned curve._

_Before he could sit up, Corvo rolled onto him, pressing him into the mattress. Daud accepted the weight with an indulgent huff._

“ _Morning,” Corvo murmured, chin digging into Daud's chest._

“ _Did you watch your fill?” Daud rumbled, and Corvo slid forward the necessary distance to quiet him with his mouth. Daud nudged up into it at first, but then fell back to the bed, a sigh blowing out of him. “I have work to do.”_

“ _You do,” Corvo returned, kissing the corner of his mouth, “right here, with me.”_

“ _That isn't work.”_

_Corvo didn't answer the obvious, but Daud must have guessed at it anyway, going by his derisive snort._

“ _Let me up.”_

“ _A moment longer,” Corvo entreated, his hands sliding firm up Daud's arms until they were bent and pulled up behind his head, his knuckles against the cold wood of the headboard. He kept dipping in, kissing Daud's brow, his cheek, his lips, again, once more, sneaking in a playful lick of his tongue that Daud welcomed with a rough, tired sound._

“ _Corvo –” he said, and it took him ten seconds to recognize the sound of a pair of handcuffs closing around his wrists. He hadn't had many opportunities to learn it._

“ _Corvo.” This time, his voice was tight with anger. “What is this.”_

“ _You've barely been sleeping,” Corvo said, relaxing against him as a tension Daud hadn't even noticed in his half-asleep state seeped out of his limbs. “And you refuse to correct this yourself. I'm forcing the issue.”_

“ _There are things –”_

“ _Thomas is on it. You trained him for this, he can manage.”_

“ _What about –”_

“ _Billie can deal with it. You know she wants to prove herself out from under your shadow.”_

_Corvo dove in and stole another kiss from Daud's shocked, half-open mouth. Daud surged into it, arching up; Corvo just barely escaped the vicious bite that followed._

“ _Uncuff me,” Daud demanded. He'd been discreetly testing the give, twisting his fingers to try and slip out. It wouldn't be that simple._

_Corvo rose to his knees, straddling Daud's chest, fingertips resting light at his clavicle like that was all the Royal Protector needed to keep the Spymaster down. “You will remain here,” he said, “at least until noon, and sleep as much as you can. You're not getting out of those, and I dare hope you won't break the headboard just to escape. I will return then,” he leaned lower, his face just above Daud's, “with lunch, and let you out.”_

_Daud's fists clenched spasmodically on the sheets by his head. He licked his lips, glaring. Corvo's fingers kept petting his collarbone._

“ _Not even going to tire me out first?” he asked, defiant. Corvo's mouth tugged into half of a smile._

“ _I have ten minutes,” he said, and slid down the bed._

“ _Then you better get to i–_ ah _–”_

 

About an hour and a half into his wait, there is a far, resounding blast. It doesn't surprise him. They'd expected this to happen. The gang they're pursuing is too fond of heavy duty explosives. He expects Daud will head back around in another half hour, perhaps forty-five minutes if there's trouble.

Four hours later the sun is starting to disappear below the jagged skyline of the Flooded District. He's ripped a galleon from his coat and has started picking at the screws fixing the radiator to the wall.

It takes two more hours, and fifteen minutes of Corvo frantically throwing himself against the restraining line of the cuffs for Thomas and Rulfio to find him. He hears the crackling of Void displacement, nearly strains his neck snapping around to look, sees the two figures in thick leather and masks –

“Where in the fucking _Void_ have you been?!” he snarls, pulling as far forward as he can, chained arm twisted straight out behind him. His eyes flicker for a second, out over the District, likes he's expecting something – some _one_ – else to appear. “Where's Daud?”

“We had no idea where you were –”

“ _WHERE_ IS _DAUD!_ ” he roars, and neither of them flinches, but the helpless way Thomas holds his hands makes the pit of his stomach grow cold.

“The Bond didn't break,” he said, “but none of us saw him get out before the warehouse blew.”

Corvo's breaths are sharp and measured, burning in his throat. He swallows.

“Get me out of these cuffs,” he says, and he knows the bruises from his struggling will stay for days and days.


	9. big brother instinct -- Daud & Rulfio

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> warnings: injuries, graphic depictions of violence

Six years after the Boss vanishes and the gang crumbles under betrayal and dissention, Daud reappears at Rulfio's window like a bad dream.

It's nearing midnight. He lives on the fifth floor of a tenement building. The only thing that stops him from screaming is momentary, paralizing fear.

Then he recognizes that all too familiar scar, and the post-adrenaline jitters make the knife tremble in his hand.

“Outsider's saggy ballsack, Daud,” Rulfio mutters. The knife drops to point at the floor, but his grip on it stays tense. Daud's eyes reflect the pinprick glow of the candle on the other side of the room. He's always been more animal than person – but where has he been, the last six years, that now Rulfio can almost feel the weight of his eyes, like Daud can see him clear as day?

“Looks like you survived,” Daud says, like the gang dissolved only a month ago. He steps down from the sill. The soles of his boots are silent as a cat's feet on the floorboards. “What do you do now.”

His voice is strange and flat, less a question born of curiosity than – than what? A necessary social nicety? Since when does Daud pay those any mind?

“Whaling, mostly,” Rulfio says. “Dock work sometimes.” He keeps his distance. The knife's handle is a significant weight in his palm.

There is a pause in the conversation. Daud's face is too shadowed for Rulfio to make out whether his expression is contempt or interest.

“You like it?” he eventually asks. Rulfio shrugs.

“I get paid.”

Daud makes a noise like a rumble in the back of his throat, and a click. Rulfio, weirdly enough, relaxes.

(He knows the face that goes with those sounds: a pointed sort of disappointment, or disapproval, followed by an impatient demonstration of the right way to punch a bigger man than you in the sternum.)

“Want a new job?” Daud asks.

 

Rulfio wasn't Daud's first recruit, but that guy ended up with a blade somewhere inconvenient when he tried to knife Daud for his cut of the prize. (There was another one before that, a Morlish man – Daud's been all the way around the Isles, looks like – but he'd been gone a while by the time Rulfio joined.)

It's not so much that they work well together – Daud had a reputation for his skill and ruthlessness already six years ago, and that's not counting the heresy he works now on the fly. (There is usually a token attempt to hide it, but Rulfio isn't stupid enough to think he can really move twelve meters in under two seconds without making a sound.) If he wanted to go solo, he could.

Yet Rulfio rarely serves as bait or distraction. More often than not, he finds himself in the middle of the fighting (when there is any, though there's probably more than there should be – it's not quite the kind of work he got used to as a gang kid).

Like now. Rulfio's fending off one of the target's bodyguards while Daud tries to get through the other two. They were supposed to get the jump on them, Daud taking out the target while Rulfio played lookout, but then one of the guards had the bright idea to look up.

He shot once, grazed Rulfio's side before Daud took him down with the crossbow bolt meant for the mark. Then it was down to a chase through narrow alleys, until the target and his men were backed into a dead end.

Rulfio's side burns. He doesn't doubt Daud is far from reaching his limit – whether he learned it from some monk in Tyvia or it's another side-effect of his heretical powers, his endurance has doubled since the years Rulfio knew him – but Rulfio himself is human, and injured, and he hopes Daud is close to getting through because his arm is starting to strain under the force of his opponent's–

All the air punches out of him, and it takes him a long, perilous second to understand why.

Before the bodyguard's blade is done drawing back out of his belly – he can feel it slide, Void, like his senses are in overdrive, metal tearing him open – he falls to his knees, expecting a finishing blow.

It never comes.

Instead, he sees the bodyguard's corpse drop in front of him, a neatly sectioned stump of neck poking out of his jacket. The head bounces off the cobblestones shortly after.

Then Daud is right up in his face, crouching to get a look at the sword still sticking out of him, so quiet and strained others things finally start filtering in around the pain, like how Rulfio can hear the target and the two remaining bodyguards making a run for it.

“They're– getting away.”

“We'll get them later,” Daud says dismissively, and Rulfio doesn't argue about how next time they'll be more prepared, wary, maybe have reinforcements. Doesn't have the breath for it. Daud puts a hand by the sword's entry point and takes a hold of the hilt. Rulfio feels a little faint.

“Sure you wanna do th–” he starts, and has to stop not to puke when Daud pulls the blade the rest of the way out. Something is pressed against the wound. Wadded up fabric. Daud takes his hands and pushes them against it.

“Keep a hold on that.” There's sweat breaking out on Rulfio's brow. It stings in the cold. “Press hard. We're moving.”

Right – the target'll send guardsmen after them at the first opportunity. They have to go.

Rulfio can't quite stand.

Daud gets a shoulder under his arm and hauls him up. Rulfio just barely holds on to the compress. It only takes a couple of steps for the both of them to know walking would be a bad idea.

Rulfio expects Daud to give it up as a bad job then. As a kid he was pragmatic, unbothered by the thought of leaving others behind if it meant he could finish a job or get out of a difficult situation.

Instead Daud's grip on him strengthens, his arm snaking around Rulfio's waist. His hand pushes at the graze from earlier, but the pain is unremarkable compared to the bullshit happening to Rulfio's stomach.

“Don't vomit,” says Daud, and then they aren't standing on cobblestone anymore. Rulfio sways and tries not to faint instead. He prays to the Outsider they won't have to do that again.

 

It takes two more of whatever that is to get far enough across the rooftops that taking to the streets again doesn't run the risk of bumping into guardsmen out for their blood. Daud gets him to the hideout, somehow; Rulfio is only half conscious for most of the distance, his head in a haze, only the constant jostling keeping him from conking out entirely. More jostling than necessary. Daud might be trying to keep him awake.

He realizes when he is set down with his back to a wall that, one, Daud took over putting pressure on the compress a while ago, blood staining a trail down his jacket and pants, and two, they're... home. At home base. Rulfio looks around, groggy and nauseous, breaths shallow.

Daud is back next to him, pushing him, urging him to lie down. There's a needle and sutures in his hand.

At some point Daud shakes him awake again.

“You have a fever,” he says, and his hand remains on Rulfio's shoulder, heavy.

“Guess I'll die,” says Rulfio, and chokes on the laugh that tries to follow. Daud's hand feels heavier for a second, then draws back.

“I might have an idea,” Daud says, and his face is turned away, Rulfio can't see his eyes, but he knows the other man's jaw is set and grim. Reminds him of something, that tone of voice. What is it?

“Yeah?” Rulfio says, wheezy.

Daud turns back to him. “I never tried it before. It might not work; or not the way I want it to.” Now he looks him in the eye. He's always been frank in the way he watches people. He doesn't shy away from Rulfio and how pale and pasty he must look. Half dead already. It'd be reassuring if Rulfio couldn't feel himself rotting from the inside. “You might not like it,” he adds, like Rulfio would like dying any better.

He's too wiped out to say what he means, but the look he shoots Daud must speak for itself. Daud's mouth draws tight. Then, he comes closer. Sits at Rulfio's side like he's already dead, and Daud's holding his wake.

“You gonna– hold my hand?” Rulfio manages, one last hurrah, but Daud answers with a pointed glare, and he does. His fingers are terribly cold against Rulfio's knuckles, but his thumb, pressed into Rulfio's palm, is strangely warm.

Right. He remembers what feels familiar now.

 

(He'd been the new kid at one point. That's never easy. The other boys had singled him out as an easy target. Mostly, they pushed him around, left bugs and lizards in his bedroll. Stole his share of the food, sometimes. Kicked him around a little. He tried to roll with it, come up fighting, but they were older, and there were more of them.

Daud came up to him in the dead of night. He tensed at first, ready for the taciturn older boy to start where the rest had left off – but Daud sat down next to his bed and said,

“I'm going to make it stop.”

Rulfio stared. Daud hardly spoke to anyone; always looked angry, sullen. Did what he was told like the others, but kept to himself. This was new and unexpected.

“I don't care if you don't want me to,” Daud continued. His voice was the bare minimum of low not to be a normal speaking voice. The boys sleeping closest to them were probably awake now. Listening in. Rulfio sat up.

“I do if it works,” he said, looking Daud in the eye, and Daud returned the stare, head tilted down like a challenge, or like he was asking: _you sure about that?_ Then he got up, and went back to his bed.

He made it stop. Rulfio liked it fine.)

 

The next morning the fever is down, and the stitched-shut hole in Rulfio's belly is coming closed, faster than he might have ever expected.

Also, there's the shadow of a mark on the back of his left hand.

Daud shows him the one on his own hand, stark black, almost oily, that he had kept hidden under his gloves. Rulfio's is only a pale imitation.

“This is what lets me transverse,” he says. Rulfio stares.

“Lets you what?”

“Move around very fast,” Daud explains, short-tempered.

Rulfio considers him, the thumb of his right hand rubbing circles into the mark.

“That's cheating, you know,” he says.

Daud rolls his eyes. “Shut up,” he says, and leaves to deal with the contract.

 

_coda:_

A slide of the knife is all he needs to unlatch the window and steal inside.

The woman living here has been contacting one of his men, regularly enough for it to be suspicious. He's observed their interactions from a distance – not hostile, perhaps even friendly – but Coleman's Bond isn't as strong as most of the others', so he can't confirm the impression through emotional leakage alone. She doesn't seem trained, a civilian at best. If she's a threat, it's not a physical one.

Blackmail, maybe. He's here to find out.

His steps are quiet. The woman is awake, looking for something under her bed, and only notices him when she turns and starts getting to her feet.

She gasps – lunges for something on the bed, glint of metal, Daud is already in her space grabbing her wrist and twisting until she drops the– the needle – it's a knitting needle – and she makes a pained noise, darting away as soon as he lets go to retrieve the weapon, eyes still on her.

“Don't kill me,” she said, crouching, watching him out of the corner of her eye.

“If I had a contract on you,” he said, straightening, “Asking wouldn't make a difference.”

Her gaze flickers from one end of the room to the other, either looking for an escape or considering what he's saying. There is no escape. The door is behind him, and he is much faster than her.

“What do you have on Colt,” he asks, flat and demanding, no room for negociation.

She boggles at him. “Who?”

“... Coleman,” he tries, though he's taught his men to use false names and will be bitterly disappointed if Coleman forgot to, and she gapes.

“ _Coleman?_ ” she says, and it'd be called yelling if she wasn't saying it low enough that Daud just barely understands the word. “He _works for you?_ ”

Daud hesitates. He may have wrongly assumed.

“What is your relationship to him,” he asks, and very immediately regrets it, because she says,

“We _boned._ ”

Later, Rulfio laughs at him. Very loudly.

“Did the Knife of Dunwall just give Coleman's girlfriend the shovel talk?” he wheezes, and narrowly avoids a vicious slap upside the head.

“ _Shut up,_ ” Daud growls.

It could happen to anyone.


	10. don't you dare pity me -- CorvoDaud (unrequited)

Corvo's office smelled of paper and dust, overlayed with the hot scent of the coffee steaming in the pot by the desk. One of the servants had brought in a bowl of grapes plucked from the stems, and scones, golden-shelled, sweet-smelling. Daud sat in the chair set up in front of the desk and waited.

Five minutes later Attano stepped through the door, looking harried.

“You should have given me advance notice,” he said, shucking off the coat to settle in his own chair.

“Left in a hurry,” Daud said. “No time.”

“What happened?”

His expression was all focus, dark eyes fixed, shoulders forward. Daud took a second to drink it in.

“Think I almost got made. Decided to head back early. Fisher's looking into it.”

It had been more frantic to live through than his words made it out to be: one of his contacts' sudden and quiet disappearance; the distinct impression he was being followed, repeatedly returning; his inability to track them down and find them – he was unused to being the one hunted. He had taken the first boat out of Cullero when he returned to one of his hideouts and found traces of a stranger's passing.

Attano was looking at him strangely.

“Coffee?” he asked, and Daud shook his head. Attano's eyes narrowed. He grabbed the dish of scones and set it down hard at the edge of the desk. “Eat something.”

Daud mechanically reached out and took one, then broke it in two, and remained sitting there with half a scone in each hand, thinking: _he's not making this easy._ He considered saying nothing, chalking up his state to stress and exhaustion, like Attano was apparently ready to. Considered letting the unspoken _what in the Void has you so out of it_ pass by unanswered. But –

But he'd seen the wild and joyous spark in the young Empress earlier, as she sparred with her Royal Protector – with her _father_ – and he'd heard her crowing in delight when she succesfully blocked an entire series of Attano's strikes, and he had seen that grin tear through Attano's focused expression, the ease of it, the looseness of his shoulders, and Daud had known that the desperate tightness in the center of his chest, the animal warmth he had let grow unchecked for years now, was too entrenched to ever leave.

“Anything else to report?” Attano asked. He seemed... irked.

“More of the same. Continued disagreement between the Duke and his heir. Construction on the Addermire Institute is ongoing. Only mild complaints about whale oil rationing.”

The peevish edge to Attano's glare didn't subside. Daud belatedly remembered what he was holding and bit through most of one half of the scone, sorely tempted to roll his eyes, meeting Attano stare for stare instead. If anything, it seemed to make Attano's stare even more fixed and determined – though no longer annoyed.

“Nothing else?”

Daud swallowed the bite. “No.”

The Royal Protector made to get up, and before Daud could quite control his own voice he said, “Attano,” and Attano turned back to him, heavy-eyed. Daud, momentarily, found words lost to him. Attano frowned when nothing followed, opened his mouth to speak, and Daud said, “Corvo,” uncontrolled.

“What?” Corvo bit out, short on patience, and Daud could only think, _You shouldn't let me call you by that name,_ but his mouth said something else entirely.

Daud had never likened anyone's face to weather. The only fanciful comparisons he tolerated were of a societal (or occasionally political) nature. Yet watching Attano's face, here and now – the only image that came to mind was one from decades ago, Daud still a child, near hanging out his mother's window to watch the too-rapid scud of clouds across the sky, the savage play of colors as they morphed and boiled, and how his mother had dragged him back inside only minutes before a storm of mythical proportions broke over the city. Now he watched the rapid shift from halting confusion to realization to instant, seething rage taking place on Attano's face, clearer than he'd ever seen, and waited for the tempest.

Attano's hands tensed on the desk, drew back, curled into fists; his shoulders hitched up – but other than that, he didn't move. Seemed to struggle a moment, mouth twisting at first with outrage then – something lost, something –

Daud felt the snarl form before it hit him what that new face meant.

“Don't you dare pity me,” he spat. Something crumbled in his hand. He looked down, and poured the remains of the scone back into the dish.

Attano had stepped back like he needed the distance, or like Daud's madness was catching. The look on his face was appropriate for it. Daud had rarely seen such expressions of mildly nauseating (or nauseated) sympathy outside of people confronted with someone else's crippling disease.

It grated. Worse than anger, which at least would be justified. He gritted his teeth.

“I was this city's worst nightmare,” he growled. “I killed and maimed and _destroyed_ for years, for coin. I don't need your pity.” It's only getting worse. Daud can feel sweat breaking out on the back of his neck. “I murdered your _Empress_ –”

That makes him move: a whole-body wave of fury, jaw setting to bare teeth, yes, that was what he should feel, what he should show, (that was what Daud _deserved_ ) –

Attano smashed his fist down on the desk, hands flexing, clearly trying to control the impulse to break something. (Break him.) He turned back to Daud with rage in his eyes.

“I refused to be your executioner years ago,” he said, and Daud couldn't quite breathe. “Don't force my hand now.”

There was nothing else to be said – nothing else he _could_ say. Daud remained quiet. The hate and poisonous anger slowly drained from Attano's face, leaving behind the soft gray ashes of that other, most unwanted of expressions.

“You know I'll never more than tolerate you,” he said, and Daud shot him a pointed glare. Was going on about this absolutely necessary? Attano seemed to think so. He mulled over whatever he was thinking of for a handful of seconds, then said, “Emily's grown fond –”

“ _Don't,_ ” Daud cut in, curt, staring at his hands rather than see any more bitter sympathy. Attano seemed to hesitate, then picked up the bowl of grapes, and set it by the scone dish.

“Eat something,” he repeated, and left.

Daud took a handful of grapes and crushed them, one by one, between his teeth.


	11. carved mark -- CorvoDelilah

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> warnings: impersonation, manipulation
> 
> actual pairing is CorvoDelilah, but there's a strong focus on CorvoJess since this is from Corvo's pov

A woman comes to his cell – cloaked, hooded. Her eyes shine strange and reflective.

She turns and says, “Release him,” and guards move forward to unlock the door. (Her voice is– Her voice–) He stares at her listlessly, stooped and sitting at the edge of his cot, from behind the lank strands of his hair.

They have to haul him up by his arms and drag him out.

She watches from where she sits on a chair by the guards' card table while they stand him up on his feet, and the way she sits is familiar in the way your face might be in a distorted mirror. Her hood falls back.

“You'll return with me,” says the woman with Jessamine's face, “to Dunwall Tower.”

Corvo's voice answers, “Yes, my Empress,” and he follows her out into the gray, raining light.

 

(Jessamine is –)

They go to Parliament and Corvo can hear the men and women murmur in the corridors after they've passed, low voices and hands raised to half-cover mouths. Rumour runs like spit from their tongues. Suspicion colors the white of their eyes. Jessamine makes no motion to show she's heard, but later, when they are almost alone, she tells him, loud enough for the Parliamentaries in disparate herds to listen in: “The next one who questions my return, I want you to make him apologize. Publically.”

He hesitates; meets the sharpness of her gaze. Then he obeys.

(Jess was –)

It is her shape standing over the line of men who went so far as to call her imposter. It is her eyes cutting across to him, dark and still and standing at the edge of the light. It is her voice that says, “Kill them, one by one,” and later, as he pulls the last sobbing, howling one up by the hair and presses his sword to the man's sternum, “No. Leave that one alive.”

He obeys.

(She did, she did, she died. Her blood dried tacky on his hands. Her head loose and heavy in his palms. Her gray eyes quiet. Hollow.)

Her skin is the same, though a little colder. She says, _It's the sea, it lives in my blood now._ She says, _I walked to the shore and woke._ She speaks of a man – a boy – a creature with black eyes.

Her hands grasp a little tighter. Her nails are kept a little longer. Sometimes they dig in deep enough that blood beads, scarlet, around their edges. He can hardly feel the pain.

She looks at her throne like she once looked at him. She looks at him like she once looked at the food she could not eat to her heart's content.

(She feels the same, _she feels the same,_ he whispers and screams and cries to himself, deep in the places no one goes to look. He wants so badly to believe it.

 _Did you expect me to come back unchanged?_ she asked him once, all bitter resentment, except for where he could hear the impatience, the desperation, the triumph. _I am not the same woman._ )

One of the few still left in her council expresses his discontent with regards to the state of things in her city. Her eyes are hooded when she looks to the man, her wrist lax under her chin. Her mouth quirks, amused and disgusted. She moves now like an entirely different animal.

She glances up at where he stands beside her chair. Her eyes speak. He hears it like a bell in the cavern of his chest.

He obeys, _oh._ He obeys.

 

“When we are alone,” and her blue eyes gleam like the top side of leaves, like carapace – “I want you to call me by a different name.”

His mouth wants to ask why. He only nods, and meets her gaze. She likes it when he looks at her.

 

Your bodies cool in the breeze from the open window. He touches the back of his shoulder; the skin is open and tender, wet to the touch. (Every rose, its thorns.) She lounges, royal and spent, but the expression on her face is in-drawn and somber.

“I am exactly where I was meant to be,” she says – “yet still, I want more.”

“What more do you want?” Corvo asks. It is still too hard to call her by the name she demanded he use.

She turns to him, and though the sun should soften her features, it is like all light that touches her turns silver and stark.

“Give me your hand,” she says.

 

After, she runs her nails along the design, their tips still dark with drying blood. Corvo's jaw and arm are sore from clenching against the cuts, but he bore it in silence. He hadn't liked the glint of interest when the first jagged hit of pain had made him hiss.

Her thumb presses hard into the center of the circle. “Now, you are mine.”

“I was always yours,” he says, and the words are soft –

soft not because they are sincere

but because it was the truth: he had given his heart, and it had been held close, and he had been happy

and he thinks, these last long months have not made it any less lost.


	12. doesn't realize they've been injured -- CorvoDaud

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> warnings: graphic injuries

It's been a rough night.

(The house was supposed to be empty – but he supposes the Overseers caught wind of the same rumours he did, because otherwise it means he made enough sound to attract a patrol. It's bad enough he didn't hear them approach before coming out the back door. The strain is starting to show.)

He lands a transversal on the roof opposite and slips, his knee buckling, only avoids a fall off the edge by catching his heels in the drain. The metal shrieks and he hears a screw come loose, but it holds.

(He stared at them like an idiot for long enough that one stepped forward and drew his sword, blocking Daud's line of escape. Daud barrelled into him, the hilt of his own blade in hand and he – he hesitated –

Sharp pain, and a blackness entirely unlike the Void.)

Dunwall Tower cuts a dark shape in the night sky. Lights at its windows, winking – candles. The Royal Protector's is among them, and open, the curtains drawn back. Expecting him.

(Woke up in Holger Square, being carried through the gate. One of them was saying:  _ “...usic box, hurry! Look, his hand – we captured him at the Winslow residence –” _ The other one, grunting under his weight:  _ “Must have smelled the black magic –” _ No. No. If they brought the box, he'd be caught like a rat in a cage –

He struggled, still slow with his brain swirling around in his skull, managed to land on hands and knees when the Overseer dropped him in surprise. Up to his feet, quick, but the first one was already grabbing him by the arm, the other drawing his sword again as though to threaten him forward – Daud swung and his knuckles split [shit. his gloves are gone] against the face of the first but there were more coming, like roaches, a swarm of gold faces, reached for his sword and found it gone too, turned, ran –

He stumbled halfway across the street and cold flooded him in a burst – fuck, was it the music? had he not been fast enough? but nothing stopped him from getting back up, nothing stopped the numbing burn in his left hand, and his boots found purchase on a streetlight, and then he was on the ledge, running, and there were tiles under his feet –)

Daud reaches the windowsill. Corvo– The Royal Protector stands with his back to the night, reading a letter by the light of the dying fire. His hair is haloed orange and gold. Daud steps down, boots making hardly a sound on the boards.

“You took longer than I exp–” he starts to say as he turns, and then all the breath is sucked back into his lungs.

Daud hardly has the time to look up again and see the fire's glint in his wide eyes before Corvo has him by the front of his jacket. “What in the Void happened,” he says, voice flat, taking in Daud's face then stepping back, a hand pressing Daud to the wall, to inspect the rest of him.

“Overseers,” Daud grits out, breathing through the pain of Corvo's hand against his sternum. They must've bruised something carrying him to Holger Square. Corvo's eyes flick up, dark and piercing.

“An ambush? Did they know?”

Daud shakes his head. “Saw me leaving the building.” It sounds less incriminating than  _ I walked right into them when I went through the door. _

“You fought.” Corvo's thumb brushes his cheekbone and Daud fights not to lean into it, despite the sting of pain. Did he land on his face when he fell? “Where are your gloves? Did they catch you?” His voice keeps halting like the breath is catching in his throat. Daud pushes against him, tries to get some space back. He can barely get any air.

“Give me a minute.”

Corvo relents and takes a step back. Daud slumps against the wall, trying to fill his lungs. He doesn't know how it can be so cold if the fire's been going long enough to nearly die out. “Cold in here. Could you –?”

Corvo closes the window. When he turns back, his eyes drop, and he stops.

“Daud. Sit down.”

Daud tries to straighten. “I don't –”

The chair is next to him now, and he's being firmly guided into it, the grip on his shoulder almost painful. Daud obeys only because he thinks he might collapse anyway if he tries to fight. “– your leg,” comes Corvo's voice through a haze of white noise, and Daud says,

“What?” squinting up at him because the firelight seems so much stronger now. “I fell coming back, must've scraped it –” and his own throat grates closed when Corvo's hand curling around his knee sends a bolt of shocking hurt up his entire body.

“Stop talking,” Corvo snaps, and stalks to the cabinet near the library, his steps tight and controlled. Fury renders him quiet, a shadow. Daud remembers. His skin breaks into goosebumps.

Corvo comes back with the lacquered black emergency kit. The long tweezers gleam in his hand.

“Turn right,” he says, curt, and Daud shuffles into place.

There's a hole in his left leg. The cloth down to his ankle shines black and dizzying. Daud retreats while his body stays in place.

Corvo's hand gripping the back of his neck draws him back up into nausea and the unsteady sway of the room. Daud closes his eyes. The image of Corvo's black, angry gaze, and the bloody bullet lying on the ground beside him refuse to go away. When a shake doesn't convince him to open them, Corvo's hand slides up to curl around his ear, the fingers tight in his hair.

“You never get caught,” Corvo says, and even sightless Daud can hear the fury in how his voice has gone low, edging on uncontrolled. “What happened?”

“They surprised me,” he mutters, helpless. He can't hold back the words.

“What did you find in that house?”

“Nothing I didn't expect.”

“Are you sick?”

Daud grimaces, his lip curling back, and his eyes finally open a sliver. “No.”

“Then tell me  _ why. _ ”

The breath he takes is too steady for how the room swings around him. “Tomorrow, it'll be a year.”

Corvo's mouth shuts. Daud can see, now, where his eyelashes shine too sharp for it to be the firelight.

“It'll be a year since. I can't stop remembering. It hounds me through the days and in my dreams and I  _ can't sleep – _ ”

The crush of Corvo's arms is almost a comfort. It hurts – his whole face burns and throbs, pressed against the shoulder of Corvo's shirt, and his ribs feel black and blue – but it's warm, an enveloping weight. Corvo's mouth rasps against his hair.

Daud wants those arms to tighten until he's nothing at all.


	13. you said you would let them go -- Corvo & Daud & Whalers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> warnings: murder, supernatural happenings
> 
> (context: high chaos au of my prince!daud au, which you can find on my tumblr @exalok; additionally, the song _Charon_ by Keaton Henson, courtesy of thegrumblingirl  <3)

Attano’s ripped-up coat, bunched in Burrows’ fists, seems too light for the weight it had had in Daud’s arms. The sword lies gleaming on the table.

“You really –” Burrows begins, and Daud cuts him off.

“Yes.” He doesn’t want to hear those words in that worm of a man’s mouth. It will make them more real. More than they should be. Burrows fingers the bloodstained tear in the side of the coat with an off-handed hum, almost derisive. Daud can’t take his eyes away from how the patch spreads, stiff and black, all the way to the hem.

“To think none of my men would face him,” Burrows sneers, and though his voice carries he’s not paying attention to the room around him. He must talk to himself often. “Not so untouchable, were you, _Lord_ Protector.”

Daud turns away, to the fire burning in the hearth. The whale-light chandelier washes out the glow it throws across the carpet. Burrows tosses the coat carelessly back to the table and takes up the blade, balanced across his fingertips, inspecting its perfect silver edge.

“In return,” Daud says, trying for strength and only hitting empty, (he can still feel it – how the blood had gone tacky on his hands – how slick it had felt, smeared between his palm and the cloth when he caught Attano as the bodyguard crumpled –) “You will –”

“Where is the body?” Burrows asks, and the Prince does not flinch.

“Given to the ocean.” Something in his gut clenches, sudden and painful. He can feel his breaths wanting to shorten and forces air back into his lungs. Burrows’ eyes, across the room, are sharp and sly, and he wants to blacken them closed.

They narrow. The man’s mouth makes an amused moue, like there is a joke here Daud isn’t in on. “Then you have no proof.”

“Is _that_ not proof enough?” Daud spits, jerking a hand at the dark pile of cloth on the table, the ceremonial sword.

“Not as good as a corpse,” Burrows returns, “Or better yet, his severed head.” He smirks, snide in his confidence. “I wouldn’t have expected a man of your stature to be so naïve.”

(Rulfio is in one of those cells, just outside, hardly twenty minutes away – Rulfio and the others, Rapha, Quinn, Feodor, Leon – and it’s been months. How much have they been fed? How much have they been hurt? His gut clenches again and this time, rather than pain, it is fury.)

“You said you’d let them go.”

“And give up such convenient leverage?”

Daud bristles, nothing but the last dregs of his control to keep his next grating exhale from becoming a snarl.

Burrows’ grip tightens on Attano’s sword. It is only then Daud realizes his own hand has reached for the sword on his hip.

“You threaten me?” Burrows curls his lip in contempt. “Guards!”

Daud tenses, half-turning to the door – should he draw his sword? Had Burrows always planned for this, for the Prince to die here and now, or will aggression force his entourage to act?

The door remains closed. The hallway is silent.

A handful of seconds pass, and Daud turns back to Burrows, who calls for his guards again – but Daud hardly hears him. The blood rushes in his ears. There, in the dark of the balcony doors, stands a shadow.

 

_His cabin still smelled of blood. Parts of the floor were dark with it, the red soaked into the wood._

_His eyes refused to close no matter how still he lay in the hammock. It was the creaking of the hull, perhaps, or the wind in the rigging overhead. Or maybe it was the ship’s rocking, riding the quiet ocean. Or the cold, as they sailed closer to Gristol. He pulled the blanket tighter around his shoulders._

_The sound of waves, splashing and sweeping up the hull. The grain of the hammock. He rolled to his other side, huffing as he readjusted._

_Air crept into his cocoon with the movement, and he tucked himself into a smaller curl to escape, goosebumps springing up along his arms, a shiver like a finger trailing down his back._

_The longer he waited, his eyes sore with exhaustion and his heartbeat a thin plucked string, the louder the waves seemed to beat against the side of the ship. He imagined it capsizing – the crew, lost to the water – drifting down through moon-shot blue to darkness until he reached the silt where Attano’s body must have settled – cold but not yet waterlogged – his face all hollows –_

_Daud lurched up, ribs seizing, thinking he could already hear the ocean trickling in – the sound of running water, like a tap left open – and saw, on the wall opposite, a shadow that should not be there._

_He turned._

(His mother had told him, had warned him, “Daud – watch yourself. There are more insidious things at work in the world than your father.” _Watch your back._ Dodge and Lee were below, in the hold.)

_It dripped, and it had silver coins for eyes._

_Daud woke with the dawn. The room no longer smelled of copper – only salt, and rot, like some great leviathan had died there in the night._

 

It must be a ghost. There can’t be another reason for the shade, drifting – no, walking – soundlessly across the carpet, to wear Attano’s bloodless face.

Burrows is whirling to face Daud, striding forward – “What have you _done_ –” – and the sword is rising, Daud’s eyes tracking the shining curve –

It stops mid-swing. So does Burrows’ head as it turns, a hand clamping strong as a vise around the back of his neck. His eyes are wide. His mouth is open and choking out a curdling noise. The sword descends, slow, inexorable despite the trembling strain in Burrows’ arm, and settles low against his throat.

Behind the Spymaster, Attano’s eyes shine as silver and flat as a blade.

 

Burrows dies silent and kneeling, neck shorn through to the white bone of his spine. The shade stands now, dripping and bedraggled, a puddle growing quiet at its feet. (Water and blood. The floor will be ruined.)

“You’re soaking wet,” Daud says, nonsensical.

The shade doesn’t move, at first. Then its mouth opens, and Daud doesn’t know whether he hears or imagines the creaking of the hinge.

“I swam the moat.” The voice would be the same, if it didn’t sound as though it was coming up from the depths of a well.

 _He swam the moat,_ Daud’s mind repeats helplessly, his eyes falling to the great blackened tear in the side of Attano’s shirt. He remembers the exact slowing rhythm of a heart dying out. “You were dead.”

“Follow me,” says that voice, and when Daud doesn’t move the shade comes to him. _“Follow me,”_ it says, too close. The closer it is, the more wrong the world feels. All of his instincts want him to recoil. His hand still twitches, abortive, as though to reach out when Attano moves back to the balcony. (Is he solid? He stopped Burrows. Killed him. Yet the light hardly seems to touch him.)

“I killed you,” Daud says, and Attano turns back, silver eyes flashing.

“He told me not to do the same.”

Daud doesn’t ask who _he_ is.

As the guards at the gate to the bridge step up, Daud glances back. Attano is gone.

Beyond the bridge, visible through the stone archway, Coldridge’s hulking black shape. This is where Attano led him. (This is where his men are waiting. Even without the shade telling him so, he knows that is where he is meant to be.) “Let me through,” he says, and the guards shuffle, awkward. They know who he is, but not what they should allow.

“On what business?” one asks, squinting and suspicious, and the other one goes down without a sound, folding like paper under a brick. It’s the work of a moment for the shade to take out the second. In his hand, the shape of a familiar knife. Daud reaches down to his boot and finds nothing.

When he looks up again, the shade is looking down, gaze weighted with something hard and disappointed.

“You stole it,” Daud says, but instead of being angry there is a great blank space inside him.

Attano wipes Daud’s mother’s knife clean on a section of his shirt. “It’s easier to hide than a sword.”

They cross the bridge. The moon is out, the night getting on; there are no guards to question them at the closed prison gate – but Attano pays no mind to the high metal shutter, heads for the stone outcropping to the left of it and starts to climb. Daud follows him to the top of the prison wall and stops. Below: the yard, a platform, a viewing booth. This is where they perform the executions.

Attano has disappeared again, but when Daud creeps to the only door he finds it locked. He scans the yard for a sign of where to go. There are windows, barred, set high in the wall; it only takes an abandoned crate dragged below them to look in. There is more than one huddled form in each of them, indistinct under the thin blankets. He knows them all.

(And it hits him with a sudden spike of nausea, thinking how good the view of the execution yard is from these cells: he also knows he won’t find them all here. Some of them died – some of them were _killed_ – and the rest were made to watch.)

“Through here,” says that welling voice behind him, and Daud turns to find Attano in the now open doorway.

The prison is silent. Nothing moves. Attano’s steps are certain as he moves forward, like he knows the place by heart ( _Of course he does,_ Daud scoffs, _he was the Royal Protector,_ ) but mostly like he knows exactly where he needs to go. Had he looked through the windows? Recognized them? Or did he _know,_ like birds sometimes seemed to know true North?

They enter Cell Block B and Daud finds he can’t take another step.

“Why are you helping me,” he asks, eyes straining to make out the bodies he’d seen through the bars in the darkness at the other end of the hall. The shade is still as soundless walking through the prison, and when it twists to look at him, its heels do not grate on the cement floor.

“I’m going to need more people.”

“Burrows is dead,” Daud barks, and though his voice cracks against the walls and echoes out Attano doesn’t motion for him to keep quiet. Is this even real? Is he awake, is he alive, or lying dead in the royal chambers next to the Spymaster, this one last taunting vision here to carry him to the Void? “You got into Dunwall Tower alone, nothing seems to stop you, what in the _Outsider’s name_ do you need _my people for_ –”

“Daud?”

His throat closes. It feels like being choked. The shade watches him stumble then run towards that voice, towards the thin figure pressed against the bars.

“Akila.”

She’s thinner than he remembers – that’s no surprise – but her eyes and hands are just as quick, fingers darting from between the bars to pull him closer. “How’re you here? Where are the guards–” she hisses, and another of the shapes in her cell rises and comes forward.

Daud’s free hand curls around one of the bars, the other busy gripping Akila’s bony wrist, feeling her pulse hot and frantic under the skin. Pickford, still wrapped in her blanket, folds a hand next to his.

“What did you bargain with,” she asks, voice heavy. Daud doesn’t answer.

“How many.”

“Leon,” Akila answers. “Ardan. Petro.” Her voice wavers as she rattles off the names. “To try and get us to talk.”

Daud closes his eyes, tries to remember. He’ll need to commission the headstones when they get back. (He needs to believe they’ll get back.)

“Where’s Rulf.”

Pickford’s eyes flick to one of the other cells. "He… He’s sleeping.” _Tortured,_ her dark tone says. _Unconscious, or sleeping it off._ She touches Daud’s hand and he lets go, the blood biting at his fingers as they uncurl. He’d been holding on too hard.

“Unlock the doors,” Attano says, dropping a ring of keys into his open hand, and Akila and Pickford startle like they’ve just noticed him.

There will be time for talking later – but still, Daud can’t stop himself asking again:

“Why?” Then, swallowing: “What’s ahead of them?”

“I’m getting Jessamine back,” Attano says, like bringing someone back from the dead is a matter of will. (He’s here, isn’t he? Soaked through, gray and unreal, but here. He was dead. He lives. Daud doesn’t know what to believe.) “For that, I need information. A network.” His eyes catch Daud’s like a hook through his chin. “Your people are the next best thing.”

Each lock clicks open under the turn of a key. Akila starts stirring everyone awake. Pickford looms at Daud’s side, suspicious eyes following Attano’s drifting way. The moon shines down on stiff and tired faces.

Daud lets himself breathe. It’s a start.


	14. anger born of worry -- Whaler pair

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> warnings: graphic injuries

“The fuck did you think you were doin', Fen?” Katrina hisses, jerking him once, sharp, by his lapels. The blood on them is fresh enough to stain her hands when Fennick grabs her wrist and she lets go to cup his face firmly between her palms.

He lets himself be tilted, one way then the other, easily enough; in the whale oil light his pupils shine weirdly, but what she catches on is the size of them, like pits, the left larger than the right. He looks mad.

_He_ is _mad,_ she thinks, _mad as a rat,_ and her lip pulls back like a snapping dog's. “How'd you get this one, huh? Gone to fight hounds?”

“'M f-fine, Kat,” he says, his tongue catching.

“Wouldn't be in Monty's sickroom were you _fine,_ ” she barks back, moves to slap him upside the head – stops herself just as Fennick flinches away with eyes squinting and wary.

He has a ragged cut going from his temple to the dimple by his mouth, starting to congeal in thick brown clots; there are still traces all down his face from where it bled into his coat collar. Worse, though, is how swollen the other side of his face looks, the one where the pupil is like a new moon, dark and empty, in the middle of his eye. The skin is reddish, purple in places. Tomorrow it'll be a whole new kind of painting. It's like he took a wall head-first.

“You tell me how you end up like this,” she says, aggressive and leaning in. Montgomery's back from where he was fetching whatever he'd gone for (salves maybe, or elixir, though they've been rationing the stuff since last year with the plague gone rampant through the streets) and he's watching, disapproval in his pursed lips. She knows he won't intervene unless it comes to blows. ( _I'm a medic, not a nursemaid,_ he'd say, hiking up a kid conked out with the fever higher on his hip, and Katrina would snort and smirk at him and Monty'd bare his teeth back, but his hand would still be in the kid's hair, cradling.)

Though the depth of Fennick's pupils turns his eyes foreign she knows the way he avoids her gaze now.

“I g-got caught by sss– surprise,” he fumbles, and it's a lie – but maybe not a whole one. His dinged-up fingers toy with the buttons at the bottom of his coat. It's a guilt-tell, and he's never guilty about lying.

Fucked something up, maybe. Someone high up already knows, anyway, going by how there's no fear in the rest of him. Rulfio? Thomas? If it's Billie, she'll try to get what happened out of her, but Katrina knows she'll fail.

The others – well, she's got a chance, but they'll probably keep it from her too.

Things've gone to shit lately. Secrets kept left and right. She never got to know everything – too far down the ladder – but she knew what mattered.

Fennick looks up at her, all dejected like a kicked pup.

“Void, Fen,” she huffs, and pulls him in, touches foreheads. He winces then pushes in harder. It's a right mess.

 

He'd gotten scars before, big ones, bad ones – a Monty regular, Outsider knows why the boss has kept him on – and he'd get more after, but that one was the worst. It closed up ropy and reddened, looking like it hurt.

The bruises faded. His eyes went back to normal – but him, he never quite got over it. Got these headaches. Bad ones, the kind that left his neck damp with sweat, his face wet – the kind where he'd keep his eyes closed all day because the smallest of lights drove nails right to the back of his skull. Headaches, and the shakes, sometimes, in his hands, or all the way through him.

She found him like that once, trembling and unable to breathe. Scariest fucking thing. She could feel her teeth grinding down to the gums for hours afterwards, fury easier to swallow than that choking, terrible fear.

She kept him in elixirs – even after the Big Knife fucked off, even after the shadow of his Mark faded from their hands, even after Thomas. Whatever she needed to do, she did; and if Fennick didn't get better, at least he didn't get worse.

 

(The Empress gets kicked off her throne – long live the Empress – and the new one's face stirs up something deep in Katrina's guts. It tastes like something best served cold. Maybe that thought is why Delilah, that rose-stinking bitch, crushes the city in her fist, but really Katrina thinks she likes seeing things crumble around her.

People run. There's no food, no safety, worse than when the plague went rampant because at least then they were trying to keep _something_ alive. The Empress doesn't seem to care whether she rules over a mountain of corpses. There's nothing left here. Nothing in all of Dunwall to keep her Fennick safe – and all she can think to do is hole up like a rat and wait for it to blow over.

She watches him shiver and grow pale, and knows how it will end long before news of an old face returning reaches the dead city's shore.)


	15. arm in a sling -- royal OT3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> more of a pre-pairing kind of deal, but there is definitely something brewing

Billie's sent Thomas again, though Daud can't figure out why. They were never close while he was in command. Thomas isn't even her second: that would be Pickford, whom Daud has seen all of three times since, and knows has never gotten on easy with Billie either – but then, there's not much he can control from a dungeon ten feet below the ground and halfway across the city. She had listened for a handful of months after his capture, at most. After that she'd started making her own decisions.

It's better that way, that she learn how to do things herself. He can't be sure they'll ever let go of him – not really. Not entirely. The numb space in his chest where the Void used to sing twinges, unsettled.

“She's been distant,” Thomas is saying, status update already over. They're getting shorter and shorter. Someday soon, Daud thinks, the Empress and her bodyguard will have no more use for him. Even now, everything he gives them is already in the mission reports they receive. In a month they might know more than he does.

Daud's lip curls a little, almost a smirk.

“And to think you used to be the best of friends.”

Thomas doesn't roll his eyes, but he does glare – at the damp cell wall, about a foot to the left of and behind Daud. “Moreso than usual, Master. The Whalers seem... divided under her orders. She disappears, and keeps it secret where she goes.”

“I didn't always share where I went,” Daud points out. The glance Thomas throws him is dark with meaning.

 _Isn't that part of the problem? That she_ isn't _you – that she_ can't _be?_

She doesn't need to be. She needs to replace him, do so in her own way. It's just not something Thomas wants to hear. Daud fears, sometimes, that it's something many of them wouldn't want to.

Footsteps echo down the staircase – Corvo's back, which means the fifteen minutes are up. (He _could_ mask the sound, Daud knows, but never does. Perhaps it's politeness. Perhaps, a smaller part of him rumbles, it's goodwill, or regard.) Thomas steps back from the bars, heavy in the way he straightens, every movement resentful as he turns to face the Royal Protector.

(He's still hoping to break his Master out, Daud knows. Four years and he hasn't stopped hoping. It'd be touching, if his protective distrust wasn't so inconvenient.)

When Corvo waves Thomas up the stairs, his sardonic little flourish only uses one arm. Daud narrows his eyes.

By the time Corvo comes back down, Thomas sent on his way, Daud is out of his chair with the reports gathered and folded into their envelope. The bodyguard doesn't even watch his hands in case he slips one away and up his sleeve; just leans against the cell bars. (Left side, Daud notes. The arm he moved before.)

He jerks his head at the empty right sleeve of Corvo's overcoat, pouring himself a glass from the breakfast pitcher.

“Fell off a roof, Attano?”

“Not far,” Corvo returns, and Daud nearly chokes on his water. He hadn't meant it _seriously._

“Anything broken?” he asks, scowling. Corvo holds a hand out for the reports. Daud taps them against his thigh, impatient, his stare steady, and Corvo makes the little exasperated grunt Daud has come to know so well.

“Ribs got banged up, nothing to worry yourself over,” he says, and smacks Daud's hand with the envelope before tucking it away in an innner pocket. Daud bares his teeth.

“Less worried than insulted you're this bad at your job.”

“I'm not the one here with an assassin's training,” Corvo retorts, and undoes the ring of keys from his belt.

The sound makes his insides screw tighter. He cuts a glance towards the stairs.

“Has Thomas gone?” He knows Thomas has. There'd be no reason for him to stay, never mind that Corvo would have made sure there was a guard to escort him to the gates.

“Out of the Tower by now,” Corvo says, and turns the key. The click of the lock opening remains despite the lack of resonance, like a smell – or an afterimage, the burn of a flash grenade. The cell door swings open and Corvo steps back.

Daud doesn't quite hesitate, but when he reaches the door he stops like the bars are still there, the tips of his boots just barely edging out into the rest of the room. Though Corvo's eyes when he meets them aren't knowing, exactly, he can almost see the thoughts and questions rise with the thinning of his mouth.

“Is it that you don't trust them?” Corvo asks, visible hand grazing where the reports are hidden in his coat. It's a reasonable question – if Daud doesn't trust his men, can the information they're funnelling be trusted? Daud squares his jaw, shakes his head.

“I trust them.” _I don't know if they would trust me._

He finds it a strange thing to think – back when he directed them from the ruins of Rudshore, whether or not he trusted his Whalers wouldn't have had any importance beyond the certainty they could do what he asked them to; whether or not they trusted him didn't matter either, beyond the certainty he could find them more jobs, and pay them their due.

Trust grew like a weed. It crawled into every one of his cracks and fissured them open. Four years in this dungeon was enough to learn that yes, he trusted them – to a certain extent – and they trusted him, more or less. For four years, they trusted that he was locked in the deepest parts of the Tower and could not get out, but was doing what he could to keep them in work, and pay, and away from a firing squad.

They think he would escape at the first opportunity.

(It came – three months ago – when the Empress walked down those stairs instead of a Whaler, instead of Corvo, and stood three careful feet from the bars to look him in the eye.

 _We've been considering according you provisional liberty, Master Daud,_ she'd said, and it had taken a moment for the words to turn the right way up in Daud's head.

 _That the royal we?_ he'd asked, his mouth undecided about hitching into a smirk or a snarl, tone light and guts immediately rampant with thorns. It was bad enough he couldn't quite focus on her, her edges bleeding, bad enough the empty songless space inside him spasmed like it wanted to howl, like it knew she was here. He stamped it all down.

 _Corvo and I,_ she'd answered, unperturbed. _He believes you're due a gesture for good behavior._

 _You don't trust me not to run._ That had been obvious – but instead of retaining that cool exterior, there was a strange spark in her eye when she replied.

_I trust him to take you down if you try._

Daud thinks she would have smiled, if she hadn't been so dead set on keeping everything inside.

The gesture: allowing him free reign of the Tower, if he so chose, as long as he never set foot outside.

The opportunity:

When Corvo unlocked his cell door, and Daud stood there, just as now, feeling strangely like the air he breathed was less stale.

When Corvo led the way up the stairs, and for the first time in four years Daud had seen a different set of bricks, and floor, and there had been the smell of food cooking, and the sounds of servants in their quarters, and the air hadn't been damp, and there had been lights all down the corridor –

When they'd wandered to the library in the main hall, and the sound of something falling, breaking, had made Corvo turn away for a heartbeat or so.

It had lasted an age – like when he prepared to jump through the Void and time stopped to let him consider – the glass-plated doors, the knowledge of the foyer beyond, the pale yard, all of it a serrated knot clawing up his throat –

And then Corvo had turned back and the tension had released and Daud had decided: he wasn't done here. Corvo had looked at him, his face an open question. Daud's eyes flicked away.

There was more he could do. There was more he _should_ do.

There were goosebumps all along his arms.)

He thinks of Thomas, and that lingering hope of his. What would they do, if they learned he had been almost free to go for three months now, and still stayed, like a tamed hound taught to heel? He didn't know. He didn't like not knowing.

Daud brushes past Corvo towards the stairs, and he must take it as an end to that conversation because the questions stop. They go up in silence. It's still a little disorienting to come out on the landing and hear the servants busying themselves down the corridor, but Daud forces past the feeling, strides confident. There's no reason to be off-balance.

The Empress is waiting on the second floor. Corvo will present her the reports, and she will ask Daud questions, and she will dismiss him, and finally – finally Daud wil be free to do as he likes, and he will not know what to do with the time. He's willing to admit he dreads it.

Maybe it's a long overdue spat of good luck that causes enough of a commotion outside they can hear it through an open window.

Corvo perks at the sound and turns to the window. His frown reads surprised – and the realization hits them both, as they make for the window, that the sounds coming from the direction of the gate are those of yelling, and metal, and gunshot.

It all goes silent far too quickly.

A look outside is confirmation enough: bodies trail from the gates, though the assailants are nowhere to be seen. Corvo hisses and whirls, heading straight for the Empress's rooms.

“Did you see them?” Daud asks, matching him. Even as Corvo gives a sharp shake of his head they hear the great double doors of the foyer crash open.

The Empress's expression is harrowed when they barrel in, and though the fear isn't showing yet it's the most Daud has seen her show in four years.

“What in the Void is going on –” she starts, the barest edge of a shake in her voice, but Corvo's already got a hand at her back to guide her out.

“The Tower's been attacked,” he's saying, “They're in the foyer, we need to reach the roof,” and Daud steals a look through the balcony doors to the figures darting below. His lip curls back. Witches – the ones from Brigmore, though something about them has changed. He lopes back to Corvo and the Empress.

“Emily?” he asks the bodyguard, but the Empress answers,

“She's out,”

and Corvo says, “The Curnows,” and Daud nods. They hurry.

To reach the roof they have to take the winding staircase in the North tower, which means whoever's in the foyer will see them pass, but it's already empty when they leave the Gold Room. Daud doesn't know where they've gone. It irks him. (It makes a cold sweat break out on the back of his neck.)

They don't stop to question their good luck, and when they come out onto the roof the Tower is silent still, silent again. Where are the Tower Guard? The rest of the City Watch? Corvo leads them to the crenelations, looks back at the open door to the stairs.

“They'll be coming up here,” Daud says, and the Empress shoots him a scathing look. He can hear the words in her voice, with that exacting tone: _We're aware._

“Corvo can fight them off.”

Corvo is looking down to the rooftops far below, down the steep side of the Tower; back at the stairs, a focused look on his face.

“Too many,” Daud says, and the Empress's eyes close fractionally and go cold in that way that says she doesn't appreciate being denied. “We need to get down. How?”

“You could,” Corvo says, sudden, dark eyes locked on Daud, who snorts.

“With the right tools, maybe. Do you have picks hidden in that coat?”

“No – like what you did, four years ago. From the waterlock to the gazebo.”

The Empress and Daud both freeze – almost imperceptible, but for how she turns to marble and the breath locks in his throat. Daud's jaw works, his mouth dry.

“Won't go as far as the rooftops,” he says, almost a rasp.

Corvo's head angles forward. “But enough not to break a leg?”

Daud swallows. “Yes.”

Corvo turns to the Empress and in the way she inhales it's clear she's about to say no but before it can leave her he says, “Jess, please,” and the word catches as her eyes flick over to the man who once tried to kill her.

“Corvo –”

“You'll be safe,” he cuts in, and she allows it, looks back at him. “I _need_ you safe.”

She breathes in once, twice, and the sounds of screaming and people running reach them from the open door. Corvo grabs Daud by the shoulder of his jacket.

“You get her somewhere out of sight,” he orders, and though half of Daud rebels at being commanded he nods, and Corvo runs to the stairs, yelling back, “I'll buy you time!”

Daud turns to the Empress. She's paler than usual. Her hands flex in her white gloves.

“There's no time for your fear,” he says archly, too on edge to control the impulse, and for the first time in four years of baiting the Empress hisses, furious,

“If I die because of this I will walk out of the Void and make sure you _suffer_ for it,”

and he can't even properly appreciate the moment because then she's clenching her fist, her Mark burning white and purple and blood-red like a beacon and the whole of his left side is burning and vibrating and numb and he can _feel it,_ it's back, the song he hadn't known was there until the Empress had closed her hand and hollowed it out of him. It thrums, rings his ribcage like a bell.

He has to take a second to learn how to breathe again around it. The knell of it takes so much more space than he remembered.

But the Empress is already there, grabbing him by the arm with both hands because he'd fallen, he was kneeling, he had to get up and so he did, and the Empress comes fully into focus this time, her strange bleeding edges wiped away. She is still furious, and doubly impatient.

“Are you ready?” she demands, and for a second it sounds like she's asking, _are you well?_ He nods anyway, steps to the edge of the roof. Wraps a hand around her arm. They have to go.

He can feel it move through him. It singes everything it touches, but like ice instead of fire. He stretches out his left hand. Curls in his fingers.

For a second it's like trying to fit himself through a pinhole: there is pain, growing, and the sensation of being stretched across too great a distance and then the wind hits and both fills and empties his lungs and his arteries and he is airborne –

On instinct his grip on Jessamine's arm tightens, which is good, because though he manages to catch himself on the slope of the roof he'd aimed for she is entirely unprepared and slips, almost falling, might have rolled right off but for his steadying her. They get to their feet, Jessamine uncertain at first, then straightening, getting her balance and bearings.

“We need to get farther,” he says. The Void beats alongside his heart; he feels overfull with it. Jessamine gets a grip on the back of his jacket and prepares for the next jump.

It's easier this time, the sensation falling back into the realm of the familiar; he guides her down to a lower rooftop, out of sight of the Tower's windows. She rounds on him as soon as he seems to slow.

“Go back for him,” she orders. “Bring him here.”

“Attano can get out on his own.”

“You said yourself there were too many of them,” she says, and anyone else would have spit the words on the shingles. Her mouth is all harsh angles.

“He can barricade the door.” Daud climbs back to the other rooftop, trying to catch a glimpse of whatever could be happening back where they'd been. “From there all he has to do is climb down. I couldn't, but I've seen him face worse than the sides of Dunwall Tower.”

Silence, for a moment, and Daud thinks he might have gotten through to her –

“His arm is in a _sling,_ ” she says, acidic, momentarily angry enough for her words to strike rather than cut. “I know he can be distracting, but I'd expect better perception from a master assassin _._ ”

Daud turns to look at her. Her arms are crossed.

“He went back in there to fight them,” he says, and for a single, stupid second, he doesn't understand. Jessamine looks ready to shoot him with a glare.

“Of course he did.”

Because, well. _Of course he did._

Daud looks back to the Tower. Corvo's in there. He doesn't bother trying to calculate the odds of him coming out alive.

“Stay out of sight,” he says, and transverses back.

He's starting to feel the drain on the power roiling inside of him when he reaches the first roof they'd landed on. It's nowhere near high enough to get to the top of the Tower from here, but – there are other ways, he thinks, looking across the roof to where it falls down, down, far and to street; across to where the Tower's northern windows glint in the sunlight.

He takes a running leap.

The shattering of glass as he transverses and slams through the second-floor window is impossible to miss – but that doesn't matter, because when he lands and rolls back to his feet he can see, at the end of the corridor, two Whalers in their leather coats. One is wearing red.

He doesn't have time to think – there is a cry of pain down the other hall and he knows that voice, he's heard that exact degree of hurt before, and he turns and Corvo is on the ground, one arm twisted behind him, the broken one crushed between his chest and the floor and there is a witch standing over him, leaning in close – grabbing him by the hair and _pulling_ –

“Now I see why she keeps you so close,” the witch says, her tone gloating, and pulls up sharp when Daud takes the sword out of a fallen guard's hand. There's something different about her, different from the witches he's worked with before. Her face is a sickly color, and her clothes seem made of flowers and stems.

“Daud,” Billie calls from down the corridor – because it's Billie, of course it's Billie, his girl, she must have been planning this all along – “Daud, we were right, you got out –”

“You'd do well to step away from him,” Daud tells the witch, and Billie falls silent.

“My coven is coming,” says the witch. Her smile is shallow, like a knife made of glass. “You think to defeat me, when you haven't used a blade in four years? You're more of a fool than I thought.”

And Billie speaks up again, closer now, clearer, her mask hanging from her hand: “She was right?” Her voice sounds like it did sometimes, when she was little. When she wanted to assert but the ground was too unstable. “You turned against us. You're– _working_ for them?”

(He can't face her questions, can't answer that accusation – he's feared it for three months and yet hasn't had time to prepare – but he knows, too, that the witch is right. He hasn't spilled blood in years. He's barely trained. He's not ready.)

Daud tightens his grip on the sword and widens his stance.

 


End file.
